Watching the Detectives

Umpiring at Home Plate

the archives are now free.

All Baseball Prospectus Premium and Fantasy articles more than a year old are now free as a thank you to the entire Internet for making our work possible.

Not a subscriber? Get exclusive content like this delivered hot to your inbox every weekday. Click here for more information on Baseball Prospectus subscriptions or use the buttons to the right to subscribe and get instant access to the best baseball content on the web.

"Despite all the nasty things I have said about umpires, I think they're one-hundred percent honest, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they arrive at some of their decisions."
-A's manager Jimmy Dykes

"What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order."
-Mystery writer Phyllis Dorothy "P.D." James

On October 12, 1997, the Braves and Marlins were in the midst of hotly-contested National League Championship Series, each team having won two games in the best-of-seven series. The Braves, the then-reigning NL champs, were the class of the league with a 101-61 record, nine games better than the next NL team, and had won a division title in six of the previous seven years. The Marlins possessed the second-best record in the league (92-70), and were expansion upstarts who had backed into the playoffs as the league's wild card just five years into their existence as a major league team.

What seemingly made the mismatch worse was that the Braves were starting four-time Cy Young winner Greg Maddux, while the Marlins started rookie Livan Hernandez, who had just 17 career starts to that point. Despite a 9-3 record and a 3.18 ERA, Hernandez was being used out of the bullpen up to that point in the playoffs. In fact, Hernandez had pitched 1 2/3 innings in relief two days earlier, coming in for Tony Saunders to help out in a 5-2 Marlins win in Game Three.

The game was a pitcher's duel that ended with Hernandez striking out Brave cleanup hitter Fred McGriff for the third time in the game on a called third strike, delivering a 2-1 win while striking out 15. Two days later the Marlins went into Turner Field, scored four runs in the first inning off Tom Glavine, and cruised to a series-clinching 7-4 win. The Marlins then edged the Indians in seven games to win their first World Series. Hernandez was named the MVP of both series.

Of course, what is best remembered from Hernandez's performance was the last strike to McGriff, but not because it reflected a great performance. It is remembered as the ultimate symbol of bad strike-zone judgment from behind the plate. The ubiquitous replays clearly showed that the pitch was well off the plate-some said by as much as a foot-before umpire Eric Gregg punched the final strike call that left McGriff incredulous. That call is now emblematic for all ludicrously bad calls on outside pitches. To go with the 15 strikeouts for Hernandez, Gregg called ten for the Braves pitchers (nine for Maddux and one for Mike Cather) in that same game. To that point, there had been just 33 nine-inning games in baseball history (and another 33 exactly since) in which both teams struck out at least ten and in which at least 25 in total were struck out.

At the time, baseball was just entering a period of umpiring upheaval. The strike zone had just been redefined the previous year, moving from the top of the knees to the bottom of the knees. In 2001, MLB reasserted the strike zone to match what is defined in rulebook (how novel!). They began to have their worked checked electronically by QuesTec. In 1999, Gregg was part of the Richie Phillips-led mass seppuku that ruined the old umpire's union, and wasn't fully resolved until this past offseason. The old umpires union, the Major League Umpires Association, was replaced by the World Umpires Association. In 2000, Major League Baseball reorganized the umpiring crews into a single pool for all games as opposed to assigning them to each league.

The Hernandez example reflects the extent to which an umpire or the umpires can change a game. How often do we hear hitters sour-grape after a tough loss, claiming that the pitcher had nothing but they lost anyway because of bad calls? It may be quite often just bluster, but we all know that there are times that a pitcher can be aided by the man behind the plate calling balls and strikes. Can this effect be quantified? Can we separate out the occasional bad call from certain idiosyncratic leanings for a given ump? And if we can do these things, how much of an effect does it have on what we see on the field? Does it even out, or does the home team profit disproportionately by it? Do these tendencies lessen as an umpire matures or do they become more pronounced?

Unfortunately, we cannot readily look up historical umpiring statistics, and if we could, how could we compare them over time without a context? Strikeouts and walks as well as batting ratios are much higher than they were thirty or forty years ago. I tried to rectify this situation with the help of Retrosheet game logs. Looking at the strikeouts and walks called in a ballgame for both teams combined, summing them over a season per home plate umpire, and then adjusting them for era, we can determine if the home plate ump has more of a pitcher-friendly or a hitter-friendly leaning on how he calls the zone. Similarly, batting ratios for the players that come to the plate while the ump is behind it can be calculated and adjusted for era and park producing the umpire's adjusted batting average, on-base, slugging, and OPS. The same can be done for catcher's interference and balk calls, the only remaining stats that are directly derived from home plate umpire decisions.

Similarly, we can evaluate second base umps by looking at what their tendencies are in calling ground-ball double plays and safe/out calls on stolen base attempts. First base umps can be reviewed by looking at their balk calls, ground-ball double play calls (i.e., for the second out at first), and their tendencies calling pick-off attempts (via caught stealing frequency). We will finally take a look at how corner umpires at first and third base call doubles and triples down the line. We'll get to these areas of umpiring in future articles-today, we're keeping the focus on home plate.

However, before we delve into the individual stats, an explanation is needed as to how umpires have been used in the past. First, we should note that the current number of four umpires per game-at each of the bases-was not always the norm. In only about 55% of all games have there been four umps, and even then, not necessarily in the current configuration-in 1919, there was a game played with an umpire behind the plate, at first, and in left and right fields.

Note that there were most probably umpires used in the 1097 games listed without umpires (or maybe the honor system was used), and we just do not know their identities as yet. Also, aside from nine games called by unidentified "scab" umps during their 1979 strike, all umpires from 1939 until today have been identified. Finally, the numbers reported upon here are complete through 2006, as are all of the statistics throughout this piece.

Now, here these numbers are broken down further to show the various configurations used given the number of umpires employed. Note that only one configuration has been used when just a single umpire is employed-home plate ump. However, there was a configuration used for two (second and third only) and three umps (first, second, and third) in which a man was not assigned to work behind the plate (unless the home plate umpire for these strike-era games are just unknown):

"Umpire's heaven is a place where he works third base every game. Home is where the heartache is."
-Umpire Ron Luciano

"Whenever you have a tight situation and there's a close pitch, the umpire gets a squawk no matter how he calls it."
-Red Barber

The home plate ump is the rock star of the umpiring crew. He gets by far the most airtime on TV and has by far the most calls to make during the game. As the rules state, he is the "umpire-in-chief" and "[h]is duties shall be to [t]ake full charge of, and be responsible for, the proper conduct of the game" (Rule 9.04 (a)(1)). He is solely responsible for calling balls and strikes (9.04 (a)(2)), making "all decisions on the batter" (9.04 (a)(4)), declaring forfeits (9.04 (a)(6)), and conveying to the official scorer the batting order at the start of the game and any changes to the lineups throughout the game (9.04 (a)(8)), announcing ground rules (9.04 (a)(9)), calling and presiding over umpire conferences to resolve differences among the umpiring crew (9.04 (c)), and making all decisions that do not pertain to a specific field ump (9.04 (a)(5)).

Eleven hundred and seventeen men in baseball history are known to have umpired behind the plate; of those just 423 have umpired at least 25 games as a home plate ump, while 212 men umpired in the majors without ever performing their duties as a home plate umpire. These are the men that umpired the most games behind the plate all time:

The bulk of a plate ump's decisions are in determining strike and ball calls. Even though the strike zone is defined in the rulebook, many umpires are known or have been known for having their own zone. As for evaluating pitch-calling, there are five basic types of home plate umpires that we will address, with most rated by base-100 era-adjusted rates:

The Pitcher's Friend: These are umps that call strikeouts more frequently than the average umpire, and call walks less frequently than average.

The Hitter's Friend: These umps call more walks than average, and strikeouts less frequently.

"Enrico Palazzo": These are umps that love hearing themselves make calls and who like to control the game, thereby calling more strikeouts and walks than average (and are, of course, named for Leslie Nielson's turn as an anthem singer-cum-ump in The Naked Gun).

"You had to pitch in and out. The zone didn't belong to the hitters; it belonged to the pitchers…"
-Juan Marichal

Below are the umpires that are the most likely to call a strikeout instead of a walk throughout baseball history. The strikeout and walk rates are cumulative for both teams in every game in which the umpire served behind the plate, and they are adjusted for the umpire's league and year. The umps are listed in descending order of the adjusted strikeout rate to adjusted walk rate (min. 25 games):

"Many baseball fans look upon an umpire as a sort of necessary evil to the luxury of baseball, like the odor that follows an automobile."
-Christy Mathewson

There are umpires that never seem to call that borderline pitch a third strike, or see ball four. Indeed, they seem reluctant to be final arbiter and prefer to allow the players to decide the game on the field. These "Let 'Em Hit" umpires tend to have fewer strikeout and walk calls than average. Note that they are ranked by weighted sum of the strikeout and walk ratio. I initially merely added the two together, but there were some eccentricities, especially Doug Eddings coming in at number three. Eddings and his 112 adjusted strikeout ratio is not exactly what I had in mind when I envisioned the ideal "Let 'Em Hit" ump; he just looks the part because of historically low adjusted walk ratio. I chose to weight the strikeout and walk components before adding them. I squared them and divided each by one hundred, the base for each squared. This exaggerated the extremes and shook out the umpires who were truly lower in both categories. However, I have included both columns in case you prefer the more straightforward method. Here are the umpires that fit that bill:

"One of the really wrong theories about officiating is that a good official is one you never notice. The umpire who made that statement was probably a real poor official who tried to get his paycheck and hide behind his partners and stay out of trouble all his life. Control of the ballgame is the difference between umpires that show up for the players and the managers."
-Umpire Bruce Froemming

There are umps who relish punching out the batter on a called third strike, guys who gesticulate wildly so that even the fans in the nosebleed sections know that the batter is indeed out. Below are the umpires who called the highest adjusted strikeouts and walks; Froemming comes in at #17. They're ranked by the highest weighted sum of the strikeout and walk ratio that I used with the "Let 'Em Hit" umps, so these guys are the opposite of the previous list, the ones who want to make the decisions at home plate instead of in the field of play:

Even though Froemming may have disparaged the umpire "you never notice," here we present the umpires who called strikeouts and walks as close to the league norm as possible; a couple of Hall of Famers make this list. They are ranked by the amount that their strikeout and walk ratios deviate from the norm (100). To quote Geddy Lee, everyone's got to deviate from the norm-everyone but Frank Wilson. To reward those umps who were more even-handed in doling out strikeouts and walks, I divided that number by the amount that the K-per-BB ratio that we introduced in the "The Hitter's Friend" section deviates from its norm (one):

"I never called a balk in my life. I didn't understand the rule."
-Ron Luciano (He was actually about average.)

As the Giants and Mets displayed on May 29, a balk call can help decide a game. With the Giants ahead 4-3 in the bottom of the twelfth, reliever Armando Benitez was called for a balk twice, the second time scoring the tying run just prior to a Carlos Delgado game-winning home run in the Mets' 5-4 win. The first balk call of the night was hotly contested by the Giants. It was called by Bob Davidson, who has acquired the nickname "Balkin' Bob" for his proclivity for calling pitchers for this infraction. Davidson may have the nickname, but I found that there have been eleven other regular plate umpires who made balk calls more often; Davidson's rate of calling balks clocks in at 164. (In the future, we will look at this more when we get to first base umps.)